Why Are We Judging Lena Dunham for the Things We Do Ourselves?

Over breakfast with a friend, the topic of the recent Lena Dunham firestorm—a web-enhanced speculation over whether childhood sexual curiosity can be categorized as abuse—found us at a crossroads. My friend was vehement that Dunham's experiences bribing her little sister for kisses, casually masturbating when they shared a bed, and finding pebbles inside her 1-year-old sibling's vagina are rites of passage similar to trying to "pee like a boy" or playing doctor. The real problem with all of this, she said, is that in shaming Dunham, we are telling women that the world doesn't want to hear about their weird shit.

I nodded along in agreement, but my initial reaction to the quotes in question was a little less sympathetic than my friend's. Now, before you call me a Dunham detractor, it's worth noting that I am a loyal Girls fan, who actually loved the Patrick Wilson episode. I also loved Tiny Furniture. And back in January of 2012, I wrote a piece for Bullett predicting the impending It girl status for its then-unknown cast. But when I first read Dunham's comments—excerpted out of context from her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl—an alarm sounded in my brain.

'There,' my internal Judge Judy seemed to decree. 'She did it. She went too far.' (I felt similarly scandalized when I read David Sedaris' Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, in which he reveals that he used to trick his friends into sitting on his lap at sleepovers.) I was especially surprised that after wincing through seasons of violent and sadistic sex guised as dark humor on Girls—scenes that made me uncomfortable, but I didn't say so out of fear of being branded prudish or conservative—a few sentences about exploration during her formative years made me uneasy. It was TMI, I quickly decided. Dunham had finally jumped the shark on oversharing.

But isn't that Lena Dunham's gift to us? When a writer or artist opens up her interior life and invites us to splash around in her psyche, she is giving away something vital, personal, and important. Perhaps this is so apparent to me because I grapple with the payoffs of oversharing on a daily basis. While working at ELLE I have written about my struggles with body image, anxiety, potentially unhealthy beauty fixations, and, most recently, life as an ambivalent pet owner. And every time I single out a still-vivid anecdote or a pervasive thought in order to document it, I remind myself that I am only human—and that there's a good chance that if something has happened to me, it has happened to someone else.

Surely that is Dunham's guiding principle as well. And for a while, it seemed no revelation was too tawdry or polarizing to topple her truth-telling empire. Sure, naysayers were ruffled that her show depicted an elitist version of an all-white New York, that she was publicly neurotic and narcissistic, that she flaunted her Pilates-free physique without shame or self-conscious body awareness, and that she was, at age 26, paid $3.5 million to write a memoir about all those things. It seemed, to me, that it was only a matter of time before the public decided to teach Ms. Dunham a lesson. And here, in a few questionably-worded sentences, the masses found their WMD. Ah, the delight with which right wingers everywhere, sick and tired of being debased by this unlikely juggernaut of artistic and commercial success, must have taken in sucking the meat from those two-dimensional, indelible bones. Words, when taken out of context or slung across the Internet with damning headlines, are indeed weapons.

For the longest time I didn't think that what people say about the things we say about ourselves can hurt us. That ended the day a woman I've never met, who has never looked me in the eye or shaken my hand, called me "a complete, selfish, irresponsible bitch" after reading my story about cohabiting with my dog, Baxter. She went on to chide, "People like you are exactly what is wrong with the 30 and under age group."

The list of superlatives women use to describe other women is poisonous. In a culture that prides itself on being inclusive, tolerant, and porous, there is clearly an unwritten, puritanical regime still calling the shots. And though my original notes on this story included the finger-wagging phrase "the absenteeism of responsibility of perspective," in writing this piece, I have decided that one more pointed opinion on how and when a writer should share her story is hypocritical. So instead, I will offer up something that happened to me when I was child. Nobody asked to hear it and it won't fit neatly into someone's definition of behavioral norms, but so what? One time, in the second grade, I was walking to the bathrooms at my open-air elementary school on a warm L.A. afternoon. No one was around so I decided, for no other reason than Why the Fuck Not, to drop trou and walk my bare buns across the corridor. I knew it was "wrong." I knew it was "weird." And I knew that if I got caught, I'd have some 'splaining to do. I did it anyway. And it was the most liberating 20 steps of my adolescent life—just me, my id, and my two butt cheeks, taking an uncalculated risk. Go ahead and judge me if you want, but I won't stop sharing just because I've been bullied for having a different perspective or opinion. I don't think Lena Dunham should either.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
ELLE participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.